The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales Read online

  INTRODUCTION BY PADRAIC COLUM

  FOLKLORISTIC COMMENTARY BY

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  212 ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEF SCHARL

  Copyright 1944 by Pantheon Books Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1972 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79718-6

  The text of this edition is based on the translation by Margaret Hunt. It has been thoroughly revised, corrected and completed by James Stern.

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Padraic Colum

  THE FAIRY TALES 1. The Frog-King, or Iron Henry

  2. Cat and Mouse in Partnership

  3. Our Lady’s Child

  4. The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was

  5. The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids

  6. Faithful John

  7. The Good Bargain

  8. The Strange Musician

  9. The Twelve Brothers

  10. The Pack of Ragamuffins

  11. Brother and Sister

  12. Rapunzel

  13. The Three Little Men in the Wood

  14. The Three Spinners

  15. Hänsel and Gretel

  16. The Three Snake-Leaves

  17. The White Snake

  18. The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean

  19. The Fisherman and His Wife

  20. The Valiant Little Tailor

  21. Cinderella

  22. The Riddle

  23. The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage

  24. Mother Holle

  25. The Seven Ravens

  26. Little Red-Cap

  27. The Bremen Town-Musicians

  28. The Singing Bone

  29. The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs

  30. The Louse and the Flea

  31. The Girl Without Hands

  32. Clever Hans

  33. The Three Languages

  34. Clever Elsie

  35. The Tailor in Heaven

  36. The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass, and the Cudgel in the Sack

  37. Thumbling

  38. The Wedding of Mrs. Fox

  39. The Elves

  40. The Robber Bridegroom

  41. Herr Korbes

  42. The Godfather

  43. Frau Trude

  44. Godfather Death

  45. Thumbling’s Travels

  46. Fitcher’s Bird

  47. The Juniper Tree

  48. Old Sultan

  49. The Six Swans

  50. Little Briar-Rose

  51. Fundevogel

  52. King Thrushbeard

  53. Little Snow-White

  54. The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn

  55. Rumpelstiltskin

  56. Sweetheart Roland

  57. The Golden Bird

  58. The Dog and the Sparrow

  59. Frederick and Catherine

  60. The Two Brothers

  61. The Little Peasant

  62. The Queen Bee

  63. The Three Feathers

  64. The Golden Goose

  65. Allerleirauh

  66. The Hare’s Bride

  67. The Twelve Huntsmen

  68. The Thief and his Master

  69. Jorinda and Joringel

  70. The Three Sons of Fortune

  71. How Six Men Got on in the World

  72. The Wolf and the Man

  73. The Wolf and the Fox

  74. Gossip Wolf and the Fox

  75. The Fox and the Cat

  76. The Pink

  77. Clever Gretel

  78. The Old Man and His Grandson

  79. The Water-Nixie

  80. The Death of the Little Hen

  81. Brother Lustig

  82. Gambling Hansel

  83. Hans in Luck

  84. Hans Married

  85. The Gold-Children

  86. The Fox and the Geese

  87. The Poor Man and the Rich Man

  88. The Singing, Soaring Lark

  89. The Goose-Girl

  90. The Young Giant

  91. The Gnome

  92. The King of the Golden Mountain

  93. The Raven

  94. The Peasant’s Wise Daughter

  95. Old Hildebrand

  96. The Three Little Birds

  97. The Water of Life

  98. Doctor Knowall

  99. The Spirit in the Bottle

  100. The Devil’s Sooty Brother

  101. Bearskin

  102. The Willow-Wren and the Bear

  103. Sweet Porridge

  104. Wise Folks

  105. Tales of the Paddock

  106. The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Cat

  107. The Two Travelers

  108. Hans the Hedgehog

  109. The Shroud

  110. The Jew Among Thorns

  111. The Skillful Huntsman

  112. The Flail from Heaven

  113. The Two King’s Children

  114. The Cunning Little Tailor

  115. The Bright Sun Brings it to Light

  116. The Blue Light

  117. The Willful Child

  118. The Three Army-Surgeons

  119. The Seven Swabians

  120. The Three Apprentices

  121. The King’s Son Who Feared Nothing

  122. Donkey Cabbages

  123. The Old Woman in the Wood

  124. The Three Brothers

  125. The Devil and His Grandmother

  126. Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful

  127. The Iron Stove

  128. The Lazy Spinner

  129. The Four Skillful Brothers

  130. One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes

  131. Fair Katrinelje and Pif-Paf-Poltrie

  132. The Fox and the Horse

  133. The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces

  134. The Six Servants

  135. The White Bride and the Black Bride

  136. Iron Hans

  137. The Three Black Princesses

  138. Knoist and his Three Sons

  139. The Maid of Brakel

  140. My Household

  141. The Lambkin and the Little Fish

  142. Simeli Mountain

  143. Going a Traveling

  144. The Donkey

  145. The Ungrateful Son

  146. The Turnip

  147. The Old Man made Young Again

  148. The Lord’s Animals and the Devil’s

  149. The Beam

  150. The Old Beggar-Woman

  151. The Three Sluggards

  152. The Twelve Idle Servants

  153. The Shepherd Boy

  154. The Star Money

  155. The Stolen Farthings

  156. Looking for a Bride

  157. The Hurds

  158. The Sparrow and his Four Children

  159. The Story of Schlauraffen Land

  160. The Ditmars Tale of Wonders

  161. A Riddling Tale

  162. Snow-White and Rose-Red

  163. The Wise Servant

  164. The Glass Coffin

  165. Lazy Harry

  166. The Griffin

  167. Strong Hans

  168. The Peasant in Heaven

  169. Lean Lisa

  170. The Hut in the Forest

  171. Sharing Joy and Sorrow

  172. The Willow-Wren

  173. The Sole

&
nbsp; 174. The Bittern and the Hoopoe

  175. The Owl

  176. The Moon

  177. The Duration of Life

  178. Death’s Messengers

  179. Master Pfriem

  180. The Goose-Girl at the Well

  181. Eve’s Various Children

  182. The Nixie of the Mill-Pond

  183. The Little Folks’ Presents

  184. The Giant and the Tailor

  185. The Nail

  186. The Poor Boy in the Grave

  187. The True Bride

  188. The Hare and the Hedgehog

  189. The Spindle, the Shuttle, and the Needle

  190. The Peasant and the Devil

  191. The Crumbs on the Table

  192. The Sea-Hare

  193. The Master-Thief

  194. The Drummer

  195. The Ear of Corn

  196. The Grave-Mound

  197. Old Rinkrank

  198. The Crystal Ball

  199. Maid Maleen

  200. The Boots of Buffalo Leather

  201. The Golden Key

  THE CHILDREN’S LEGENDS 202. St. Joseph in the Forest

  203. The Twelve Apostles

  204. The Rose

  205. Poverty and Humility Lead to Heaven

  206. God’s Food

  207. The Three Green Twigs

  208. Our Lady’s Little Glass

  209. The Aged Mother

  210. The Heavenly Wedding

  211. The Hazel-Branch

  Folkloristic Commentary by Joseph Campbell

  About the Illustrator

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE place where the storyteller was the coming of night was marked as it was not in towns nor in modern houses. It was so marked that it created in the mind a different rhythm. There had been a rhythm of the day and now there was a rhythm of the night.… The storyteller seated on a roughly made chair on a clay floor did not look unusually intelligent or sensitive. He certainly did not look histrionic. What was in his face showed that he was ready to respond to and make articulate the rhythm of the night. He was a storyteller because he was attuned to this rhythm and had in his memory the often repeated incidents that would fit it.… These notions were in the present writer’s mind once upon a time when he sat in a cottage where the traditon of storytelling was still in being.

  A rhythm that was compulsive, fitted to daily tasks, waned, and a rhythm that was acquiescent, fitted to wishes, took its place. But when the distinction between day and night could be passed over as it could be in towns and in modern houses the change of rhythm that came with the passing of day into night ceased to be marked. This happened when light was prolonged until it was time to turn to sleep.

  The prolongation of light meant the cessation of traditional stories in European cottages. And when the cottages took in American kerosene or paraffin there was prolongation. Then came lamps with full and steady light, lamps that gave real illumination. Told under this illumination the traditional stories ceased to be appropriate because the rhythm that gave them meaning was weakened.

  Other things happened to put traditional stories out of date. Young people went to schools and learned to read. The world reached into the villages; wars and the doings of congresses interested country people more and more. Claiming attention for the happenings of the day before, the newspaper reader took the place of the traditional storyteller, the man of memories.

  A real culture, we know, is all of a piece and all its parts fit together. Household stories imply work done in a household and work done in a household implies household stories. In western Ireland today a loom or a spinning-wheel is a sign that one can find a traditional storyteller in the cottage or in the neighborhood. The present writer has heard from his elders that in times when the girls of the neighborhood came to a cottage to do the spinning a storyteller was fetched to entertain them. Men and women coming in from factories would not be entertained by household stories but people who worked in the house would. The prolongation of light, the introduction of books and newspapers, the cessation of the household arts all went together to make an end of traditional stories in European cottages.

  There were other reasons. A widespread language took the place of dialects and the language of the traditional stories became obscure. The meaning of the stories could only be put baldy into the widespread language; the current language was not traditional enough to relate the traditions in. In High German, the Brothers Grimm noted, a story gained in clearness (that is, clearness for the reader), but it “lost in flavor, and no longer had such a firm hold of the kernel of the thing signified.” They were wise enough not to put all their collection in High German; frequently they retained the dialect of the district where they heard the stories.

  Today we can hear traditional stories but in very out-of-the-way parts of Europe. A writer who lived in such places gives us a sense of distance from the modern world when he puts a storytelling session before us. “He is so blind that I can gaze at him without discourtesy, and after a while the expression of his face made me forget to listen.… The glow of childish transport that came over him when he reached the nonsense ending—so common in these tales—recalled me to myself, and I listened attentively while he gabbled with delighted haste: “They found the path and I found the puddle. They were drowned and I was found. If it’s all one to me tonight, it wasn’t all one to them the next night. Yet, if it wasn’t myself, not a thing did they lose but an old back tooth.” *

  The Brothers Grimm tell us about one who at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave them their best stories, a woman from near Kassel. “Her memory kept a firm grip on all the sagas. She herself knew that this gift was not granted to everyone, and that there were many who could remember nothing connectedly. She told her stories thoughtfully, accurately, with wonderful vividness, and evidently had delight in doing it. First, she related them from beginning to end, and then, if required, repeated them more slowly, so that after some practice, it was perfectly easy to write from her dictation.” Very likely, because they had to write down her words, the Brothers Grimm laid stress upon this storyteller’s verbal memory; others in listening to her might have thought that her real gift was perception of pattern, and her real accomplishment making it, the pattern, evident.

  “There were those who could remember nothing connectedly.” We might say that they were the mediocre storytellers who confused the pattern by putting incidents in the wrong place, by using unfitting metaphors, by making a hurried beginning or a hurried end, by being unable to use the chiming words that made special—or, as we would say now, that featured some passage: ‘puddle’ with ‘path,’ ‘tooth’ with ‘lose,’ for example.

  The rhythm of night, marked in the place where it was told, set the mood without which the traditional story would have diminished appeal. The household arts there were unvarying from generation to generation, and so were the patterns of the stories. One did not introduce new designs into weaving or cart-building, and one did not introduce new designs into storytelling. We have been told that the hearers of traditional stories wanted to have remembered incidents, remembered sentences, repeated. But the unvarying content of a story was not altogether due to a liking for the same thing over again. The good traditional storyteller had a sense of pattern and prided himself or herself on knowing and keeping to it.

  Because they had few possessions and these transmitted to them, or made by their own hands or the hands of people they knew, the tellers and hearers of these stories valued things, visible, tangible, usable things. They put a thing in the center of the story and it gave a pattern. What an advantage it is to a storyteller to have a feeling for the value, for the uniqueness of a thing! Things remain real while mental states become doubtful to us.

  The golden slipper on the stairway is what the incidents in “Cinderella” lead up to and lead away from. And the gold of the slipper puts into greater obscurity the drably dressed girl crouched by the ashes. In “Snow White”
there is the looking glass of the wicked queen which is doubled in the glass coffin in which Snow White is laid by the kindly dwarfs. In “Briar Rose” there is the spindle that is doubled in the thorns that hedge the castle. In “The Goose Girl” the horse’s head that speaks is doubled in the hat the wind blows away, and in “King Thrushbeard” the crockery which the king’s daughter has to sell is doubled in the jars which, as the kitchen maid, she uses to bring the dinner leavings home, and which break, too. These correspondences are like rhymes which chance gives a poet and which, duly set down, gives his poem a happy completeness. Another kind of correspondence is in “Rapunzel:” the maiden has long hair and the witch confines her in a tower, and we do not know whether the tower makes it proper she should have long hair, or whether her long hair makes the tower part of the story.

  It is this achievement of pattern so much more fundamental than that achieved by the conscious writer that makes the best of these stories so memorable. In “The Water of Life” the flowing of the fountain (not a still well, mark!) is set against the rigid lines of the ravine that the narrow-minded brothers find themselves in and the iron wand and the iron doors that close at twelve o’clock. The flowing water, the unconsumable loaf, the sword that ends the waste of war are things proper for the generous-minded younger brother to gain. And there is the golden road that leads to the princess’s castle. Narrow-minded as before the elder brothers can only take one side of it while the younger brother can take its whole expanse.

  The primary stories—leaving out of account fables and anecdotes—are concerned with subjection, the subjection of the hero or heroine, and this has to be made striking or pathetic; with wisdom from within or without that provides release, and this has to be made transcendent, with compensation that means a return to a human life that is greatly enhanced. In some of the stories the subjection, the release, the compensation have to come over again as in the case of the girl whose wisdom released the hero and who is displaced by the false bride. The incidents have to be marvellous but the human situation has to be recognizable.

  Recall “One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes.” The incidents apart from the characters with one eye and three eyes are marvellous: her goat provides meals for a hungry girl and when it is killed its entrails planted in the yard grow into a tree with golden and silver fruit. But how recognizable is the situation of Little Two-Eyes between her jealous sisters and her inimical mother. Being different from the others she is spied upon and talked about and no gentleness on her part can save her from that excess of ill-will which unfeeling people can always find in themselves. A sentence reveals how poignant her situation is: “Then Two-Eyes said the shortest prayer she knew, ‘Lord God, be with us always. Amen,’ and helped herself to some food and enjoyed it.” We know that the girl was really hungry.